← Back to context

Comment by morpheuskafka

19 hours ago

This article might be handy for someone interviewing at that firm (Red Balloon) that sends you a "weird" hard drive as the interview CTF? I still have it sitting around but it arrived around finals season so I never really looked at it, but since they bothered to send a whole drive and SATA-USB adapter, it obviously must have something to do with the drive itself.

If someone had a ton of money, it would be funny to just send the thing to a data recovery lab, have them swap the platters onto an unmodified model and get a raw image of the data to work with. (Or maybe the key is hidden inside the drive firmware chip itself?)

7 comments

morpheuskafka

Reply
jareklupinski  16 hours ago

i still have mine too! managed to talk to the microcontroller and dump its firmware, but didn't know enough about how to make it arbitrarily run code without worrying about ruining it all

red_balloon  18 hours ago

Appreciate the (unaffiliated) shout out! No comment on the drive recovery idea...

The fundamentals in the article are all relevant to the hard drive challenge, though the actual multi-step solution to our CTF is rather different.

If hacking hard drives sounds intriguing to you, we're hiring reverse engineers and security researchers! See our whoishiring posts and careers page for details:

- https://redballoonsecurity.com/careers/

Be sure to mention Hacker News if you apply.

  • justinclift  4 hours ago

    As a data point for anyone curious, they're US based ("Midtown West in New York City") and their careers page mentions the roles are all in-office ones.

    Ah well. ;)

  • busterarm  18 hours ago

    I'm glad you all are still doing this challenge. Ang handed one to me at Defcon 6 or 7 years ago and it's one of the most interesting challenges I've ever attempted.

    Didn't finish it but learned a ton.

    For anyone reading, Red Balloon is a great place with great people and I highly recommend anyone remotely interested give them a look.